Exploring AI-Driven Professional Services Automation: Insights from RocketLane's Sri Ganesan

[00:00:01] Professional Services Automation is an area that IT service providers talk about a lot. But what can we learn from those in the project-based professional services automation space? Sri Ganesan is the co-founder and CEO of RocketLane. He joins me today on this bonus episode of the Business of Tech. Well Sri, thanks for joining me today. Dave, thanks for having me on. So I'm super excited to talk to you because you've been leaning into professional services automation tool.

[00:00:31] focused on project and focused on infusing AI into the product. Give me a little bit of a sense of what problem you're focused on solving.

[00:00:41] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Yeah, I think the core of what we are trying to do here is there's a lot of client facing projects that various services teams run. And you want to move away from being hero driven in how you deliver on these client facing projects to making things more system driven.

[00:01:02] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Bringing in tighter governance. And today I think the way all of this happens is, you know, best effort, not driven by tools. You're always relying on, you know, someone doing a great job.

[00:01:17] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: That's where we started our journey. Like how do we standardize and make project delivery consistent?

[00:01:24] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: That's the crux of where we started building our company.

[00:01:29] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Now everybody uses the phrase AI to make it hip and cool. And I get that. Give me what your definition of the artificial intelligence component of the product is.

[00:01:39] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Yeah, the way we see it, you know, there's automation and there's artificial intelligence. Sometimes people conflate the two.

[00:01:49] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: We've employed both in how we, you know, have thought about creating our product, right? So there's an angle of automation that helps people do their projects more efficiently.

[00:02:01] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: But there's also intelligence that we've brought in. I'll give you a couple of examples. One is when you think about staffing a new project that's coming.

[00:02:12] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: You need to match various conditions. You need to know who's available when you need to know what their skill sets are. You need to also look at what is their cost. And, you know, do you want to optimize for profitability on this project? Or do you want to balance the load on your team?

[00:02:30] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: On the basis, which options you select, our software will automatically suggest the right team for you to staff on your project. You can still add, you know, further filters, variances. This is more of like a machine learning model that we're talking about, which, you know, suggests, hey, this is the best fit team that we have for you. And then in one click, you can go and staff that project. The one click part is, of course, automation. The rest of it is

[00:02:58] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: You know, machine learning model. So that's one example. Another great example is, I think, in the sales world, a lot of us are familiar with tools like Gong and, you know, Avoma, etc., which do call recording and then automation for sales teams to do their work better, you know, fill in the CRM automatically, etc.

[00:03:25] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: In the post-sale delivery world, there is nothing that is built to integrate and work well with your project delivery tools, right? And that's an area where we've innovated to say, hey, if there is a project delivery team that's going on calls with customers, what can we glean from those calls, which can help automate filling a document that you need to put together?

[00:03:54] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: What can we automate pulling from those calls to fill in, like, an email that you need to compose after the call? And you can define your own prompts for what you want to get, like, as placeholders that go into email templates that we have or document templates that we have.

[00:04:09] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Great example is, hey, I want to document all the decisions made on this call, along with the key dates that are mentioned and who made those decisions.

[00:04:19] And that can be a placeholder, we call it an AI fill, which you can templatize and say, this AI fill needs to go in this part of my email template.

[00:04:29] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: And then when a project manager needs to send out communication, they pull a template, that template has one or more AI fills, you can substitute those with the actual content, just by selecting a Gong recording or a Zoom recording saying, hey, here's the recording I want to pull from.

[00:04:46] And then the rest is magic, right?

[00:04:47] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: So it sort of gives you a head start in all of the communication and documentation and, you know, the mundane part of note taking that needs to be translated into something that's delivered in a customer facing manner.

[00:05:04] Now, I would think with this approach, you've learned a lot about what is necessary to make data usable to be very effective in this kind of what are some of the lessons you've learned about data and data governance?

[00:05:17] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: That make the product really effective.

[00:05:19] Yeah, I think the more you automate collecting data or you make it low friction for teams to enter data, these are the two things that are going to help you get better quality data.

[00:05:35] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: There's a reason why very often, you know, when you look at tools in the CRM space or customer success space, for example, you will find that, you know, the intelligence that you build on it is not very effective.

[00:05:52] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: You don't trust, for example, that there's this world of, you know, customer success where people don't trust the health scores that are predicted on risk store scores that are predicted from systems because when the underlying data is wrong, you can't get the predictions right.

[00:06:07] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Our approach to this has been.

[00:06:10] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: How do you simplify inputting data into a system?

[00:06:14] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: A great example is, you know, the chore that we all hate to do time tracking, right?

[00:06:19] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: End of week.

[00:06:21] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Teams need to track their time.

[00:06:24] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: You know, they're going to put in their time based on maybe referencing something from a calendar or like they have some logs, notes somewhere that they're looking at.

[00:06:35] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: What we've done is provided them with a beautiful calendar integration where you can say, hey, I want to pull in.

[00:06:42] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: I can see all these meetings on my calendar.

[00:06:44] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: I want to pull those in directly into my timesheet.

[00:06:47] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: So select those meetings.

[00:06:49] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: It also automatically categorizes things based on, you know, patterns it's seen before.

[00:06:54] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Hey, this meeting last week was, you know, it's a recurring meeting.

[00:06:57] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: So I already know that this was last week counted as a customer facing meeting.

[00:07:03] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: So I want to say this is a customer meeting.

[00:07:05] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: It's by default there.

[00:07:06] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: If I want to override it, I can.

[00:07:08] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: But how much ever you can pre-fill for a team member, how much ever you can like automate their work with quality of data is going to become better.

[00:07:16] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: I would say that's our biggest learning.

[00:07:20] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Make it low friction.

[00:07:22] Provide the right nudges for people to, you know, fill data if they need to do it manually.

[00:07:28] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: You know, not just nudges, but also I would say wherever you can take the action to where they are.

[00:07:36] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: For example, there's a Slack integration from which in Slack you can update the status of a task.

[00:07:43] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Then it's more likely than that the team member will select and update that status right there versus having to come to a different system to do it.

[00:07:52] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Those are the small things that we have learned and optimized for over the last few years.

[00:07:56] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: And that makes a ton of sense.

[00:07:57] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: And I think the other area that I really like to get your expertise in is you've managed to balance both automation with human oversight.

[00:08:06] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Tell me a little bit about how you've achieved the balance there and why it's important and how you've achieved that in implementing it.

[00:08:13] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Right.

[00:08:14] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: The way we look at this intelligence and automation can be more about signals and call to actions for team members.

[00:08:26] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Great example is from a project governance standpoint, the way people govern projects in the old world was, hey, let me look at a dashboard for something.

[00:08:38] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Let me go to this dashboard every Monday, look at what projects are in red, let me ask some questions to my team members about it, or have them fill out a different spreadsheet somewhere else, etc.

[00:08:52] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: When you bring in automation, this can be more proactive.

[00:08:58] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: This can be about, hey, we've detected that this project had a slippage of schedule on a critical milestone two times now.

[00:09:09] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: So, VP of this delivery team, do you want to reach out to the customer about this?

[00:09:16] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Do you want to ask your team about this?

[00:09:19] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Do you want to intervene?

[00:09:20] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Right.

[00:09:20] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: So it's going to push a prompt to a leader so that it's not about a project manager raising their hand and saying, hey, I need help, which often doesn't happen on time.

[00:09:30] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: It happens too late for you to recover.

[00:09:33] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: But if there's an early warning about a signal, it could be schedule health, it could be scope health, it could be budget health, it could be customer sentiment, which is all things we're detecting from the system itself.

[00:09:45] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Right?

[00:09:46] Like, hey, here's what we're seeing in the system.

[00:09:48] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Based on that, can we send this early warning signal to a leader?

[00:09:54] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: And it can be an escalation matrix.

[00:09:56] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Plus it goes to a manager, then it goes to a director, then it goes to a VP, depending on what's happening.

[00:10:01] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Then it turns your delivery world around into being more proactive, into leaders engaging faster when they can still save situations with customers.

[00:10:12] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: And overall leads to, I would say, better rigor and more on time delivery, more projects that don't have to go into an escalation.

[00:10:23] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Right?

[00:10:23] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: So that's sort of how we look to balance what is automated versus where the automation is helping the right folks get engaged at the right point in time in the journey.

[00:10:36] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Likewise, depending on the size of a customer, size of a project, maybe in some cases it's okay to automate certain weekly status updates that are going out.

[00:10:47] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Where you make it about, here are the updates that we want to push out and it's going to go out every Friday.

[00:10:56] You set expectations with the customer that this is automated and it goes out on time.

[00:11:00] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: At the same time, there may be larger enterprise projects where you don't want something to just go out automated.

[00:11:09] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: You want the team member to take the effort to do it.

[00:11:12] And in those cases, again, you may still have automation do bulk of the work in putting together the initial version of the draft of what you have to send out.

[00:11:22] But then a team member still overrides it, adds their additional context that they have, and then pushes it out to the customer.

[00:11:30] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: So you're able to balance where you do more automation, where you do assistance from technology with human oversight.

[00:11:40] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Now I would feel like that there would be areas where you've encountered significant barriers in adopting this style of project management, particularly for those that are career project managers or have been trained in classic project management style.

[00:11:54] How do you see companies addressing those?

[00:11:56] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: Yeah. I think we've seen in our earlier years when we started Rocket Lane and launched it, we had some pushback from project managers who were used to working a certain way.

[00:12:11] Sri Ganesan, Ph.D.: And I would say our first lesson was project management is a very personal experience in a way.

[00:12:17] People have their ways of doing it that they want to stick to.

[00:12:22] You know, someone is used to operating off lists.

[00:12:25] They want to do that.

[00:12:27] Someone is used to keeping things very simple in a Kanban board.

[00:12:31] They want to do that.

[00:12:31] Someone else wants like the perfect Gantt chart with, you know, all kinds of dependencies and, you know, lags built into it and whatnot.

[00:12:42] And to service this market well, you need to do all of it.

[00:12:46] You don't have like a escape from that.

[00:12:49] At the same time, if you're able to showcase, here's how we are improving your world.

[00:12:53] Here's how we are enabling you to provide better visibility to customers out of the box through a beautiful branded customer portal.

[00:13:02] Here's how we are helping you automate sending out those weekly updates.

[00:13:06] So once we give them those power tools, which help them hold customers accountable more easily, help them, you know, reduce the amount of grunt work they have to do, help them focus on like the high impact work that they do.

[00:13:21] I think that it actually resonates with them.

[00:13:25] The other part is they actually appreciate the fact that you can systematize how project management happens.

[00:13:33] You can productize governance in a way because they know that they have colleagues, you know, PMP holding project managers who are, you know, very, I would say, you know, very strong at their, you know, field.

[00:13:49] They want to bring that same rigor in projects that their colleagues are doing who may not come from the same background, who are almost part-timing as project managers along with serving as consultants in a project for smaller projects, etc.

[00:14:02] And they appreciate the fact that the rigor that they want can be imposed on everyone or like that compliance is now possible with software in place.

[00:14:14] So I'm going to ask you to get out your crystal ball a little bit.

[00:14:17] Tell me where you see professional services automation going in the next two to three years.

[00:14:22] Yeah, my sense is we've already entering the next gen of PSA in the sense that what used to be more of like glorified time tracking and, you know, some amount of financial tracking, budget tracking has turned into a full-fledged, you know, all-in-one delivery tool for, you know, services team.

[00:14:48] Which does both the back-end operational side of, you know, staffing, managing the effort and budget, understanding the profit and utilization, etc.

[00:15:01] As well as the front-end of the collaboration with the customer, the delivery, the experience you're delivering to the customer, like digitizing all of that.

[00:15:10] Where it's going towards, I feel is there's going to be more influence of AI for sure, where AI is not just helping you with productivity and automation, but also, you know, providing insights proactively.

[00:15:23] It's telling you, hey, this stakeholder from the customer side hasn't joined three meetings in a row.

[00:15:30] So maybe something is wrong here.

[00:15:32] Take a look at that.

[00:15:33] Or it's giving you insights on, hey, here's what we've learned across all the, you know, projects that you're running.

[00:15:42] Here's where things are going wrong for you.

[00:15:46] Or even guiding and coaching a project team member.

[00:15:49] Hey, you know, in your kickoff calls, here are the five things that need to happen.

[00:15:54] And by the way, you do these three things well, but you're always missing out on these two other items.

[00:16:00] So being able to, you know, see, you know, what's happening in sales from a coaching, from a intelligence, account intelligence standpoint, etc.

[00:16:12] That's going to happen in the post-sale world as well.

[00:16:14] And I feel that will help service delivery teams level up in new ways, sort of become more productized in how they deliver the service.

[00:16:27] I think we talk about productization of services usually in the context of, like, the offering is productized.

[00:16:32] The offering is, you know, standardized.

[00:16:34] But I feel the delivery of it can also be standardized and be made more predictable with more AI and automation coming in.

[00:16:43] Shreeq Ghanasani is the co-founder and CEO of Rocketlane, a SaaS startup specializing in AI-driven, project-based professional services automation.

[00:16:51] With a strong background in customer experience, artificial intelligence, and SaaS, he previously co-founded Conator, a mobile-first user engagement platform acquired by Freshworks in 2015.

[00:17:02] Shreeq, I've learned a lot today.

[00:17:04] Thanks for joining me.

[00:17:05] Thank you so much for the opportunity, Dave.

[00:17:08] Happy to chat.

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